Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction (3 page)

Ian turned and moved away from the doors and back towards his two companions. As he did so, the doors swung open again, bathing the control room once more in an unearthly light. He spun round and began to walk smartly back to the doors which, as he approached them, thudded shut one more.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked irately. ‘Are you playing a game with me?’

The two girls shook their heads. Susan looked particularly distraught. The Doctor and the TARDIS were the only two things in her life which had proved constant and true; and now her grandfather lay unconscious on the floor, and the TARDIS was beginning to behave with an almost malevolent unpredictability. If those two things failed her what would she have left?

Suddenly she shook herself out of her uncertainty and sprang to her feet. With the Doctor out of action she was the only one who could possibly discover what was happening to the TARDIS.

‘I’m going to try the controls,’ she resolved.

Barbara muttered a word of caution but Susan strode resolutely over to the central control console. She reached out a hand to touch the controls on one of the six panels but before she could, her body convulsed, her back arched, and she fell away from the controls to join her grandfather unconscious on the floor.

Ian rushed to her side, and felt automatically for a pulse. He looked over to Barbara. ‘She’s fainted,’ he said. ‘But I don’t understand it—she was perfectly all right a minute ago.’

‘Yes,’ said Barbara. ‘But a while before that you were all unconscious...’

Ian stood up and moved to the control console. As he did so he staggered and seemed about to fall. Barbara was at his side in an instant.

‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice full of concern.

Ian shook his head. ‘I don’t know... I suddenly felt dizzy...’ He raised a hand to his brow. ‘And I’ve got this terrible headache...’

‘That’s not like you at all...’ said Barbara. Normally Ian was in the best of health. You don’t think it could be radiation sickness, do you? Like we had on Skaro?’

‘I don’t know, Barbara,’ Ian replied helplessly. ‘We don’t know what power that explosion may have unleashed...’

‘Sit down,’ urged Barbara. ‘Let me help you to a chair.’

As they moved away from the console, Ian pointed to the doors. This time they had remained closed. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘What is going on around here? How could those doors have opened by themselves?’

‘Ian, you don’t think something could have taken over the TARDIS, do you?’ Barbara could still hear the steady in-out in-out breathing all around them; logic told her it was the TARDIS’s life support systems—but in the threatening gloom of the control chamber she was not too sure. Had an intruder somehow come aboard the TARDIS and was even now stalking them?

‘How am I supposed to know!’ snapped Ian and then immediately apologised for his sharp tone; the tension and uncertainty of their situation were beginning to affect him too.

By their feet the Doctor began to groan. Barbara bent down to tend to him. ‘He’s beginning to stir,’ she said, and then looked at Ian in concern. ‘Ian, are you feeling better now?’ Ian said he was. ‘Well, take Susan and put her to bed. I’ll look after the Doctor.’

Ian nodded, and picked up Susan gently in his arms. As he left the room he turned for one final look at Barbara kneeling in concern over the frail figure of the old man. ‘If anything happens, let me know.’

Barbara smiled, a half-hearted smile which did nothing to conceal the anxiety she felt. ‘What could happen?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know...’ said Ian, and realised that in this ignorance lay their greatest weakness. If they knew what they were up against they could approach it rationally and conquer it. But in the darkness and silence of a strangely threatening TARDIS all they had was their fear of the unknown, a fear which was already tearing their nerves to shreds.

As Ian left the room, the Doctor’s eyelids fluttered open. He looked up glassy-eyed at Barbara’s face. It seemed to take several moments for him to recognise her. And when he did his first concern was for his granddaughter.

‘Susan,’ he croaked through dry lips. ‘Is Susan all right?’

Barbara smiled reassuringly down at him. ‘She’s fine. Ian’s taking care of her right now. But how are you?’ Satisfied that his granddaughter was well, the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief and allowed himself to examine his own condition. With the schoolteacher’s help he managed to sit up. ‘My head...’ he complained and felt the bandage.

‘You cut your forehead when you fell,’ explained Barbara. ‘But you’ll be all right; the ointment is working its way it.’ The coloured stripes on the bandage were much paler than before, a sure sign that Susan’s treatment was working.

The Doctor massaged the back of his neck. ‘It hurts here,’ he complained.

Barbara examined the old man’s neck; she could see no sign of a lump or a bruise. As she looked, the Doctor let out a sigh of terrible anguish.

Barbara was shaken: she had never seen the Doctor like this before. For the first time she realised how much they all depended on him and how central he had become to all their lives; if anything were to happen to him there was no telling how they would ever escape from the madhouse the TARDIS seemed to have become. Would Susan, a mere child, be able to operate the Ship’s controls by herself? Barbara knew that she and Ian certainly couldn’t.

Looking into the deep impenetrable shadows which shrouded the control room, and listening to that laboured in-out in-out breathing, Barbara was suddenly worried and very, very scared...

Ian carried Susan’s limp body down shadowy corridors until he reached the TARDIS’s sleeping quarters. As always, he wondered at the sheer size of the time-machine. Its corridors and passageways seemed to wind on forever and he knew that during his short time on board the Doctor’s Ship he had only explored a small fraction of them.

In fact, all he had seen of the TARDIS was the control room and the living, sleeping and recreational areas. There was no telling what else might be hidden deep inside the time-machine.

The Doctor and Susan had talked of a laboratory and a workshop, even of a conservatory and a private art gallery and studio, but the Doctor actively discouraged further exploration of his ship. Even after long weeks of travelling together and their ordeals on prehistoric Earth and on Skaro he still did not quite trust the two schoolteachers who had forced their presence upon him in
Totters Lane
.

Suspicious and ungrateful old goat, thought Ian as he opened the door to Susan’s room with his foot. Like the rest of the TARDIS Susan’s room had been plunged into a semi-darkness, and though Ian’s eyes had now become accustomed to the gloom, he still moved around the unfamiliar room with care. He found the bed and laid Susan gently upon it.

Looking about the room he saw an antique oil lamp on a table and he lit it with a match from the box in his pocket. The flickering flame of the lamp distorted and magnified the shadows on the wall, but he was grateful for the light it afforded him.

He picked up a patchwork quilt which was slung over a chair and covered Susan with it. The girl’s pulse was still racing, he noted, and she was running a temperature.

She needed something to keep her cool, he decided. He left the room and went down the corridor to the nearby rest room. The Doctor had shown Ian and Barbara only recently how to operate the food machine, and Ian thought he must have mis-set the controls when the machine clicked and whirred and registered the fact that it was empty of water. Nevertheless, as with Susan before him, a sachet of water was produced and Ian took it, wryly thinking that perhaps the Doctor’s genius at inventing gadgets for all manner of things wasn’t as good as he made it out to be. Even in his present situation that thought gave him some strange satisfaction: the Doctor wasn’t all that clever after all, in spite of all his rhetoric.

When he returned to Susan’s room he stopped dead in his tracks. Susan was wide awake and standing stiffly by her bed. Her right arm was raised and in her hand she pointed a pair of long scissors threateningly at Ian.

Ian took an instinctive step backwards and regarded Susan warily. Her face was white, drawn and stretched, her stylishly cropped dark hair a wild mess; her eyes stared wide open and mad, blazing with terror.

‘Susan, what are you doing?’ he asked softly, at the same time taking a cautious step towards her.

Susan lunged viciously forward with the scissors, warning him not to come any closer. But when she spoke her voice was stilted and staccato, like a robot’s. ‘Who—are—you—’

‘Susan, it’s me, Mr Chesterton,’ Ian said, and reached a hand forward. ‘Give me the scissors, you don’t need them.’

‘What—are—you—doing—here—’ Again that flat, emotionless tone, belied by the fear in her eyes.

‘Susan, give me the scissors,’ repeated Ian firmly.

Susan stared madly at him and dived forward, aiming for the schoolteacher’s face. Ian retreated, just in time to avoid the sharp points of the scissors.

Susan was about to make another attack when her expression changed and she looked curiously at Ian, seeming to recognise him for the first time. She looked confusedly from his face to the scissors in her hand and then back to his face again.

Ian stood by helplessly as Susan wailed with anguish and frustration and fell back weeping onto her bed. Like a person possessed, the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl began to slash with the scissors at the mattress of her bed. This continued for almost a minute and then she fell back onto the bed, teary-eyed and exhausted, burying her head into her pillow.

By her side the scissors clattered and fell, useless, to the floor.

As soon as the Doctor had regained his strength, his first concern had been to check on the health of his granddaughter and, with Barbara’s support, he had walked shakily down the passageway which led to her room.

When he discovered his granddaughter weeping on her ripped and torn bed, and Ian standing dumbfounded by her, he seemed to recover his former vitality and sharply ushered the two schoolteachers out of the room, closing the door on them.

Ian and Barbara stood outside for long minutes while the Doctor talked to his granddaughter. They exchanged worried, grim looks. Once again they were being made to feel the outsiders on the Ship, excluded from the alien lives of the Doctor and Susan. The them-and-us mentality, so expertly displayed by the Doctor, did nothing for their peace and security on board the TARDIS.

‘What happened in there?’ asked Barbara.

Ian showed her the scissors he had picked up off the floor of Susan’s room. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Susan seemed to go crazy... didn’t seem to recognise me... and then she attacked me with these scissors.’

Barbara expressed disbelief. Ian continued: ‘Don’t expect me to explain it, Barbara. She was like a person possessed.’

Barbara felt a tingle of fear run down her spine at Ian’s words. She changed the subject. ‘What do you think they’re talking about in there?’

Ian shrugged. ‘How should I know? No doubt we’ll find out when they’re good and ready.’

Finally the door opened and the Doctor came out. ‘Susan is resting peacefully now,’ he said. ‘I’ve given her a mild sedative.’ He paused to give the two teachers a withering look, as if to accuse them for Susan’s confused state of mind, and which clearly expressed the very low opinion he had of them. ‘Now I suggest that we put our heads together and discuss our current predicament.’

He led the way to the rest room and eased himself onto the Chippendale
chaise-longue
, childishly taking up the whole of the seat so that Ian and Barbara were forced to stand. When he spoke it was as though he were addressing a group of slightly dim-witted students, and did not encourage any interruptions. Like so many of the Doctor’s ‘discussions’ this one was no more than an opportunity for him to hold forth before a captive audience.

‘Now this is the situation as I see it,’ he began. ‘We have suffered a massive explosion, the result of which has been that the main drive and power functions of the TARDIS have been massively curtailed. As of yet we have no means of establishing the cause of this explosion or how seriously the rest of the Ship has been affected. Susan has suggested to me that the TARDIS has stalled, and somehow become trapped within the time vortex. That I dispute. All indications on the parts of the control board which are still operational tell me that we are still in flight; and yet the time rotor is motionless suggesting that we have, in fact, materialised. The time rotor is one of the most sensitive instruments on board my Ship and I feel much more inclined to believe that. We have undoubtedly landed.’

‘But where?’ persisted Barbara. ‘Where are we?’ The old man’s steady logical tone was beginning to infuriate her.

The Doctor shook his head and raised a hand to silence her. ‘Tut, tut, all these questions, Miss Wright...’

His patronising tone finally proved too much for the former history teacher. ‘You just don’t know, do you!’ she snapped. ‘For all your pontificating and high-minded attitude you’re as much in the dark as the rest of us. Why don’t you admit that you haven’t the faintest idea what has happened to us and let us all try and solve this problem together?’

‘My dear Miss Wright, I have many more years of experience than you can ever have dreamed of,’ retorted the Doctor, furious at having his ability called into question by a mere twentieth-century Earth schoolteacher. ‘I have studied at the greatest institutions and with the most brilliant minds in the entire universe. If I cannot find the answers to this problem then I doubt very much whether your primitive mind can even discover the questions!’

Barbara darted a look of sheer, undisguised hate at the pompous, arrogant old man. If Ian had not laid a restraining hand on her shoulder there was no telling what she might have done; but the chances are that it would not have done the Doctor’s health any good.

Instead she contented herself with glaring at him and then walked smartly out of the rest room in disgust.

Ian was more level-headed than Barbara and, though the Doctor’s arrogant and abrasive attitude infuriated him just as much, he thought it wiser to appeal to the Doctor’s vanity. The man was insufferable, certainly, but he was unfortunately speaking the truth: he was indeed the only one who could rescue them from their present predicament. It would do well to flatter him for the moment.